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<title>New To Inform?</title>
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<p><span class="headingpaneltext">New To Inform?</span></p>
<p>Inform is both an application and a language for creating text-based
interactive stories. Interactive fiction is an art form which evolved out of the
adventure games of the 1970s, in the same way that today's graphic novels
evolved out of the newspaper cartoons of the 1930s. Inform has been the design
tool of choice for many, indeed most, of the world's leading writers in this
genre since 1993, and is also widely used in education at a variety of levels.
It's completely free, even when used to create commercial works. Thanks for
downloading this copy, and we hope you'll enjoy it.</p>

<p>As you've seen, the app begins with a launcher panel. (Bring it back or
remove it by typing Shift+F1.) You might like to try clicking Onyx, the smallest
of the samples, under the &quot;Open a Sample Project&quot; list: it's a very
short Russian folk-tale. Inform will ask you to choose somewhere on disc to
store it, and then make a copy there. You can play with this and alter it
freely, then throw it away when you're done: it's just a copy.</p>

<p>You can have several Inform projects open at once, but each one lives in a
single window which is divided in half. The left and right sides are called
&quot;panes&quot; and you can choose what's shown in them with the side tabs: it
starts out as Source on the left, Documentation on the right.</p>

<p>Inform &quot;translates&quot; the instructions in the Source into a playable
story. To see that in action, click the Go button for the Onyx project. You'll
have to wait just a moment - an Inform project is a surprisingly complicated
thing to make, even when the instructions look short - but then the Story pane
will open, and you can type in commands as if you were the player. If you're not
sure what to type, try typing:</p>

<blockquote>
    TEST ME
</blockquote>

<p>The Launcher also offers a larger sample project called &quot;Disenchantment
Bay&quot;, a story about a boat trip in Alaska. Beyond that, there are around
450 Examples in the Documentation, and by clicking on the &quot;save as
project&quot; icon you can get playable versions of all of those, too.</p>

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